Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso Case Study

The digital division of Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso is an Italian multimedia firm whose parent company—Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso SpA—publishes the national daily newspaper la Repubblica and the weekly magazine l'Espresso. Through its subsidiaries, the media group also publishes 13 local daily newspapers and broadcasts three national radio stations. The organization’s digital division ensures the group’s brands can reach audiences across all digital channels.

• The media group had an on-premises IT infrastructure consisting of more than 400 physical servers. It needed more agility in its operations to cope with periods of high traffic to its websites and wanted to give the IT team time to focus on developing services.
• Chief Technology Officer Luigi Lobello was also worried about the group’s servers residing in one data center. “The digital division of Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso is a 24/7 operation. We can’t have a single point of failure, and we need to be 100 percent confident that our IT is reliable," Lobello says. "It’s all about ensuring the customer has an excellent experience.”
• Lobello and his team looked to the cloud to increase flexibility and speed up development, but they needed to ensure any migration was completed without disruption to end users.
  

• Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso’s digital division chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its range of managed cloud services. Lobello says, “We knew we could find solutions to our everyday problems in the AWS portfolio. AWS has pioneered best practice in the cloud.”
• Working in the EU (Ireland) region in a multiple Availability Zone configuration, the media organization runs more than 140 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with Auto Scaling to automatically provision capacity for its critical architectures. It takes advantage of Amazon ElastiCache for object caching and key/value storing, and it uses AWS CodeDeploy to automate code deployment on Auto Scaling instances. Amazon Route 53 simplifies routing of traffic to its websites. In addition, the firm uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to manage its databases and Amazon Redshift for business intelligence.
• Lobello and his team are currently exploring AWS Lambda with the Amazon API Gateway for developing the interfaces to its own APIs.
  

• Zero downtime ensures consistent service: Having moved the assets needed to deliver 70 percent of the traffic on its digital properties—including its la Repubblica website—to the AWS Cloud, Lobello reflects, “We've achieved our migration to AWS without a single second of disruption to services.”
• Unpredictable traffic volumes are easily handled: Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso news sites can cope with extreme spikes in traffic using AWS. “We can’t predict how much capacity we’ll need from one minute to the next, so Auto Scaling is an invaluable feature,” says Lobello. “If a big news story breaks, we can experience up to a 300 percent increase in traffic to a site. With Auto Scaling, we just watch the system scale up and then scale back down when compute resources are no longer needed.”
• Team focuses on innovation, not maintenance: Managed services such as Amazon RDS mean Lobello and his team can concentrate on improving Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso’s digital services.